Mac v/s Vista

With Apple now shifting to the Intel platform - the Mac has become another shark hungry for the market share being doled out by the beleaguered Microsoft Vista.
To quote from the Apple web site:

Why upgrade to Vista when you can upgrade to Mac? Especially when you can move all your stuff from an old PC to a shiny new Mac in less time than it takes to add the memory, hard disk space, and graphics card you’ll probably need to install Vista. Here are three easy ways to make your move.

That's a pretty strong statement coming from the Apple stable and yet another indication of the poor feedback offered by Vista users. Personally, I feel Vista is still just as secure as Windows XP from the user's point of view but more secure from the programmers viewpoint. The whole crux of the matter being that Microsoft forgot its end users while trying to implement new revolutionary (read: proprietary) technology for its programmers. With the .NET platform still stuck onto Windows due to the poor help offered by M$ in porting it to linux (for obvious reasons), Microsoft's credibility with the Open Source guys is going to the dogs - so much so that they have started an online campaign at http://badvista.fsf.org/blog. This is hot on the heels of Microsoft signing pacts with LG and Xandros that state that M$ will not prosecute them for any (perceived) patent violations for a period of 5 years, a deal that is similar to the one signed with Novell last year. IMHO, this is yet another tactic to prevent linux adoption by implicitly spreading false and misleading information (also called FUD) about linux. Have a look at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2140955,00.asp for more info.

On a side note, its quite likely that Google is funding a hush-hush compilation of a linux distro to gain a foothold in the desktop space so more fireworks are likely soon. As it is, Google's new Google Desktop provides a sidebar for Win XP users, a combination with a good theming engine will give users lesser and lesser reason to upgrade to Windows Vista.

For people interested in more technologies (muck?) coming from the Microsoft stables, have a look at the Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) beta 2 and Windows Server 2008 beta available for free download from here and here respectively and decide for yourself. However, don't forget to check the minimum system requirements, most likely, your PC is obsolete for these "revolutionary" technologies. (And I thought the most basic function of an OS was interfacing between the user and the hardware at minimum resource cost. Guess I was wrong... ;-)